Monday, March 31, 2014

Critics cite irony of annual report filing: 'This is a company that everywhere it goes it creates poverty'

Lauren McCauleyPublished on Wednesday, March 26, 2014 by Common Dreams

Although
a notorious recipient of "corporate welfare," Walmart has now admitted
that their massive profits also depend on the funding of food stamps and
other public assistance programs.

In their annual report,
filed with the Security and Exchange Commission last week, the retail
giant lists factors that could potentially harm future profitability.
Listed among items such as "economic conditions" and "consumer
confidence," the company writes that changes in taxpayer-funded public
assistance programs are also a major threat to their bottom line.The company writes:

Our
business operations are subject to numerous risks, factors and
uncertainties, domestically and internationally, which are outside our
control ... These factors include ... changes in the amount of payments
made under the Supplement[al] Nutrition Assistance Plan and other public
assistance plans, changes in the eligibility requirements of public
assistance plans ...

Walmart, the nation's largest private employer, is notorious for paying poverty wages and coaching employees to take advantage of social programs. In many states, Walmart employees are the largest group of Medicaid recipients.

However,
this report is the first public acknowledgement of the chain's reliance
on the funding of these programs to sustain a profit.

According
to Stacy Mitchell, senior researcher with the Institute for Local
Self-Reliance, the irony of their admission is that Walmart "is the
company that has done, perhaps, more than any other corporation to push
people into poverty."

Citing a Penn State study, Mitchell told Common Dreams
that research has proven that "when Walmart opens a store, poverty
rates are negatively impacted" and that the more stores that have opened
in a particular county, the worse it is. "This is a company that
everywhere it goes it creates poverty."

In addition to their own
worker's low wages, Mitchell explains that Walmart, because of their
enormous size and market power, have "held down wages for the whole
sector."

Imagine
if Jackie O got arrested for losing her son after smoking. Now meet the
woman facing life in prison for something like that

Seven
and a half years ago, a Mississippi teenager named Rennie Gibbs went
into premature labor and delivered a stillborn baby girl named Samiya.
Initially, experts attributed the baby’s death to the umbilical cord
wrapped around her neck. But when traces of a cocaine byproduct showed
up on the autopsy report, a medical examiner declared the stillbirth a
homicide and cited cocaine toxicity as the cause. Shortly afterward, the
16-year-old Gibbs was charged with murder, specifically “depraved heart murder”, a charge that can carry a sentence of up to 20 years to life in prison.Since
her grand-jury indictment in 2007, Gibbs’s team of attorneys has been
fighting for the charges to be dropped on both technical and legal
grounds. The defense argues that there's no scientific proof that
cocaine use can cause a stillbirth – and that the “depraved heart
murder” statute did not apply to unborn children at the time of Samiya’s
death. A decision is expected any day now
as to whether the Gibbs case will finally proceed to trial or get
dismissed. If it does go to trial, and Gibbs is convicted of murder for
being 16 and pregnant, then a dangerous precedent may be established
that should make anyone with a uterus feel very afraid.

This week,
I spoke with one of Gibbs's attorneys, Robert McDuff, who told me that
he volunteered his services to the public defender assigned to the case
back in 2009 because he was concerned about the implications for women
everywhere if the prosecution is successful:

It’s
ridiculous that this teenager is being prosecuted for a murder charge
not justified by either law or science. If she can be tried for
allegedly taking drugs during her pregnancy, what is to stop other women
who miscarry or suffer a stillbirth from being prosecuted because they
smoked cigarettes or drank alcohol or just didn’t follow their doctor’s
orders?

Central to the Gibbs case is whether her alleged cocaine use directly caused her baby’s stillbirth. A recent ProPublica investigation by Nina Martin goes into some detail on this aspect, outlining serious doubts surrounding the medical examiner's conclusion
that drugs were the cause of death. The reliability of the examiner's
work has been called into question before, and at least four murder
convictions based on his evidence have been overturned.

In
her decision, Judge Jan Jurden suggested Robert H. Richards IV would
benefit more from treatment. Richards, who was charged with
fourth-degree rape in 2009, is an unemployed heir living off his trust
fund. The light sentence has only became public as the result of a
subsequent lawsuit filed by his ex-wife, which charges that he penetrated his daughter with his fingers while masturbating, and subsequently assaulted his son as well.

Richards is the great grandson of du Pont family patriarch Irenee du Pont, a chemical baron.According
to the lawsuit filed by Richards' ex-wife, he admitted to assaulting
his infant son in addition to his daughter between 2005 and 2007.
Richards was initially indicted on two counts of second-degree child
rape, felonies that translate to a 10-year mandatory jail sentence per
count. He was released on $60,000 bail while awaiting his charges.

Richards
hired one of the state's top law firms and was offered a plea deal of
one count of fourth-degree rape charges -- which carries no mandatory
minimum prison sentencing. He accepted, and admitted to the assault.

In
her sentence, Jurden said he would benefit from participating in a sex
offenders rehabilitation program rather than serving prison time.

Delaware
Public Defender Brendan J. O'Neill told The News Journal that it was
"extremely rare" for an individual to fare well in prison. "Prison is to
punish, to segregate the offender from society, and the notion that
prison serves people well hasn't proven to be true in most
circumstances," he said, adding that the light sentence for the member
of the one percent raised questions about “how a person with great wealth may be treated by the system.” (Though perhaps it provides more answers than questions.)

According
to the The News Journal, several attorneys claimed treatment over jail
time was a deal more typically granted to drug addicts, not sex
offenders.

NEW
YORK -- The nation's most segregated schools aren't in the deep south
-- they're in New York, according to a report released Tuesday by the
University of California, Los Angeles' Civil Rights Project.

That
means that in 2009, black and Latino students in New York "had the
highest concentration in intensely-segregated public schools," in which
white students made up less than 10 percent of enrollment and "the
lowest exposure to white students," wrote John Kucsera, a UCLA
researcher, and Gary Orfield, a UCLA professor and the project's
director. "For several decades, the state has been more segregated for
blacks than any Southern state, though the South has a much higher
percent of African American students," the authors wrote. The report,
"New York State’s Extreme School Segregation," looked at 60 years of
data up to 2010, from various demographics and other research.There's
also a high level of "double segregation," Orfield said in an
interview, as students are increasingly isolated not only by race, but
also by income: the typical black or Latino student in New York state
attends a school with twice as many low-income students as their white
peers. That concentration of poverty brings schools disadvantages that
mixed-income schools often lack: health issues, mobile populations,
entrenched violence and teachers who come from the least selective
training programs. "They don't train kids to work in a society that's
diverse by race and class," he said. "There's a systematically unequal
set of demands on those schools."

While segregated schools are
located throughout New York state, the segregation of schools in New
York City -- the country's most heterogeneous area -- contributes to the
state's standing. Of the city's 32 Community School Districts, 19 had
10 percent or fewer white students in 2010. All school districts in the
Bronx fell into that category. More than half of New Yorkers are black
or Latino, but most neighborhoods have little diversity -- and recent
changes in school enrollment policies, spurred by the creation of many
charter schools, haven't helped, Orfield argues.

Only 8 percent of
New York City charter schools are considered multiracial, meaning they
had a white enrollment of 14.5 percent or above, the New York City
average. "Charter schools take the metro's segregation to an extreme,"
according to the report. "Nearly all charters" in the Bronx and Brooklyn
were "intensely segregated" in 2010, meaning they had less than 10
percent white student enrollment. The Civil Rights Project considers 73
percent of New York City charters to be "apartheid schools," in which
less than 1 percent of students are white, and 90 percent were
"intensely segregated." (Orfield clarified that he uses the word
apartheid to make "people understand what it's like when you have a law
that requires racial separation -- we are very close to that level.") Charter supporters have argued
that Orfield's methodology compares schools' racial composition to
those of boroughs or cities, but not their immediate surrounding
neighborhoods.

Andrea GermanosPublished on Tuesday, March 25, 2014 by Common DreamsAir pollution is the world's largest single environmental health risk, the World Health Organization said on Tuesday.

According
to the body's just released estimates, seven million people died in
2012 as a result of air pollution. That amounts to one in 8 deaths
worldwide.

"The risks from air pollution are now far greater than
previously thought or understood, particularly for heart disease and
strokes," stated Dr. Maria Neira, Director of the WHO's Department for
Public Health, Environmental and Social Determinants of Health.

Their
findings attribute 80 percent of outdoor air pollution-caused deaths to
heart disease and stroke; those diseases were implicated in 60 percent
of indoor air pollution-caused deaths.

Because the indoor air
pollution is often the result of smoke and soot from cooking stoves,
women and children pay a particular heavy price.

"Thanks to
effective regulatory and legislative policies over the years, the United
States has made significant strides towards cleaning up deadly
emissions from some of the largest sources of air pollution — old dirty
diesel engines and coal-fired power plants – and has done so
cost-effectively," Ann Weeks, Senior Counsel and Legal Director at Clean Air Task Force, told Common Dreams. "But, as the WHO finding points out, the rest of the world, particularly the developing countries, has a long way to go."

The
WHO called their new data a "significant step in advancing a WHO
roadmap for preventing diseases related to air pollution" — and Weeks
said the U.S. experience can help in creating such a roadmap,
"particularly [for] women, children and the elderly who are most
vulnerable."

WHO's Neira issued a call for action as well.

"Few
risks have a greater impact on global health today than air pollution;
the evidence signals the need for concerted action to clean up the air
we all breathe," she stated.

_________________

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License.

Finance industry rakes it in from dubious fees.

Los
Angeles paid at least $204 million in fees to Wall Street in 2013, and
probably significantly more, in addition to principle and interest
payments, according to the report, "No Small Fees: LA Spends More on Wall Street than Our Streets."
The study, issued today by a coalition of unions and community
organizations, shows that due to revenue losses from the “Great
Recession,” L.A. "all but stopped repairing sidewalks, clearing alleys
and installing speed bumps. It stopped inspecting sewers, resulting in
twice the number of sewer overflows." L.A. spends at least $51 million
more in Wall Street in fees than it allocates for its entire budget for
the Bureau of Street Services.

The researchers caution that the
$204 million figure likely underestimates the true amount, because under
current disclosure rules, deals made with private equity companies and
hedge funds do not have to be publically disclosed. Also, because the
city does not list all these fees in one centralized report, hundreds of
individual documents must be reviewed to uncover the amounts. As one of
the report's researchers stated,

"This is the first
time an accounting of fees has been exposed for a specific public
entity, and we don't think we have captured it all. So if you do this
for every public entity, cities, counties, school districts, states, and
universities, transportation agencies and other public entities we
could be looking at an astounding amount of money for education and
community services money sucked out of the system."

Astounding
indeed. My back of the envelope estimate, extrapolating the L.A.
experience to the economy as a whole, suggests that the fees Wall Street
extracts from public entities could total more than $50 billion a year —
enough to provide free tuition at every public college and university
in the country.

The coalition offers the following pragmatic reforms that could be implemented quickly.

I turned 31 a few months ago, and a month later I moved out of
Brooklyn and back into my childhood bedroom in my parents’ house in
Oakland, Calif. At that point, my latest bout of unemployment had lasted
about nine months, and the looming end of my Emergency Unemployment
Benefits at the year’s end prompted the begrudging decision to, at least
temporarily, give up my independent life.

I graduated from Vassar College 10 years ago with a BA in Film and
dived into life in New York City full of optimism and excitement for my
future. I imagined that I’d be “rich and successful” by the time I was
25. After failing to secure a job in my field immediately after college I
turned to retail. It was fairly easy work to get, and once I ascended
into the world of high-end luxury designer sales, it afforded me just
enough money to live a fairly comfortable — if still a paycheck to
paycheck — existence while I pursued my creative passions. A couple-year
interlude working as a production assistant on films and television
shows offered some brief hope that I may actually make it into the
business, but life as a freelancer was hard and I spent months on and
off unemployment waiting for new projects to materialize. The desire for
something stable sent me back to retail, where I remained until I was
laid off a few years later. In retrospect I probably could have been
more aggressive in securing a career, but in a city like New York you
either work or you starve, and jobs became harder and harder to come by
as the years wore on and the economy crashed, so the motivation to take
what you could get and not give it up was strong.

Being poor anywhere sucks, but there’s perhaps a particular kind of
soul crushing that one experiences being poor in New York City. The cost
of living is so high, and the constant inundation from all around you
of experiences you could be having, things you could be buying, luxury
apartments where you could be living, if only you had the finances,
slowly break you down inside. Various people have asked about “savings”
over the years; I think at one point I might have had two or three
hundred dollars in a savings account, but honestly, I don’t know how
anyone who lives in New York City could have savings unless they make
six figures. My “affordable” rent in Park Slope, Brooklyn was never less
than $900 a month, and it never stopped going up, unlike my income. On
average, after rent and bills, I probably had less than three hundred
dollars per month to put toward food, other expenses and social
activities. As the years wore on, and my employment became less and less
steady, I relocated to a cheaper building in a less glamorous
neighborhood, but since I wasn’t making as much money, that did little
to ease the stress of supporting myself. Sometimes after rent and bills I
had nothing leftover, and the only reason my rent checks didn’t bounce
was because of my credit line with my bank.

Sometimes I really didn’t have the money to eat three full meals a
day. I would splurge on a 10 dollar lunch to keep me going through the
work day, and then I’d eat nuts, cheese and fruit for dinner, or a can
of tuna, or a bowl of plain rice, and drink a cheap beer because I knew
it would fill up my stomach. It always seemed like every time I could
almost catch a break something would go wrong to keep my head under
water. My bank would randomly seize a couple hundred dollars from my
account because I had stopped making credit payments when I needed to
pay rent, or a bedbug infestation in my building required me to wash
everything I owned and buy a new mattress, or even though I had received
taxed unemployment benefits somehow I still ended up owing the
government money when I filed my taxes and risked having my wages
garnished if I didn’t come up with the money.

Many years ago, when I was 20 I thought either Greenwich Village or
the Haight Ashbury were the best most desirable places to live.

My
initial explorations showed me that even in 1967 New York City was an
outrageously expensive place to live unless you had a rent controlled
apartment.

But it had neat club where musicians I like played, all sorts of book stores and museums as well as a hip scene.

I
had wanted to go to California for a long time and it was further away
from home, just going was an adventure so I decided on San Francisco and
the Haight Ashbury.

I was crushingly disappointed by the Haight.

Oh,
San Francisco had a great music scene, was home to City Lights Books.
Just eating in the greasy spoons of Chinatown and the Mission was an
adventure.

And the hip scene was beyond words.

But Berkeley had all that and more, plus it had cheap places to live as well as a far less brutal police force.

So my friends and I moved to Berkeley.

In 1974 I moved to Los Angeles.

In those days LA was a paradise. Beautiful weather. I found a cheap apartment on Sunset, just east of where the Strip began.

In
the early 1980s I moved back to the Bay Area. The rents were already
sky high and while the music scene was still affordable living there was
a struggle.I spent the end of the 1980s back in LA. The
neighborhoods I could afford were more dangerous and the apartments
weren't as nice. The bookstores were moving away from Hollywood and
everything was getting to be a struggleWhen I met Tina I went to live with her on Long Island. It was my first experience with living in suburbia.It was nice. Really nice, quiet with room for hobbies.Together
we moved to Dallas/Fort Worth. We live in a nice suburb and while we
are planning on down sizing to a smaller house with lower taxes we are
generally looking in the same part of north east Dallas.We like Texas in spite of the politics and religion.Great cheap restaurants, great live music scene, Half Price Books and really nice people.Now
we live on the edge of a major metroplex, one where artists and other
lower income folks can actually live and have enough left over to enjoy
life.But more importantly I don't really
miss New York or Los Angeles and I sure as hell don't miss San
Francisco, which I grew to hate.But most
of all I don't miss the supercilious attitudes, the
pseudo-sophistication and vague sense of superiority people who live in
those high price places project upon those of us who live in more
affordable areas.

Because
nature doesn’t always behave the same in a lab, test tube or computer
program as it does in the real world, scientists and engineers have come
up with ideas that didn’t turn out as expected.DDT
was considered a panacea for a range of insect pest issues, from
controlling disease to helping farmers. But we didn’t understand
bioaccumulation back then -- toxins concentrating up the food chain,
risking the health and survival of animals from birds to humans. Chlorofluorocarbons, or CFCs,
seemed so terrific we put them in everything from aerosol cans to
refrigerators. Then we learned they damage the ozone layer, which
protects us from harmful solar radiation.

These unintended
consequences come partly from our tendency to view things in isolation,
without understanding how all nature is interconnected. We’re now facing
the most serious unintended consequence ever: climate change from
burning fossil fuels. Some proposed solutions may also result in
unforeseen outcomes.

Oil, gas and coal are miraculous substances
-- energy absorbed from the sun by plants and animals hundreds of
millions of years ago, retained after they died and concentrated as the
decaying life became buried deeper into the earth. Burning them to
harness and release this energy opened up possibilities unimaginable to
our ancestors. We could create machines and technologies to reduce our
toil, heat and light our homes, build modern cities for growing
populations and provide accessible transport for greater mobility and
freedom. And because the stuff seemed so plentiful and easy to obtain,
we could build vehicles and roads for everyone -- big cars that used
lots of gas -- so that enormous profits would fuel prosperous,
consumer-driven societies.

We knew fairly early that pollution
affected human health, but that didn’t seem insurmountable. We just
needed to improve fuel efficiency and create better pollution-control
standards. That reduced rather than eliminated the problem and only
partly addressed an issue that appears to have caught us off-guard: the
limited availability of these fuels. But the trade-offs seemed
worthwhile.

Then, for the past few decades, a catastrophic
consequence of our profligate use of fossil fuels has loomed. Burning
them has released excessive amounts of carbon dioxide into the
atmosphere, creating a thick, heat-trapping blanket. Along with our
destruction of natural carbon-storing environments, such as forests and
wetlands, this has steadily increased global average temperatures,
causing climate change.

Religious belief systems prefer a small cosmos with humans firmly at the center.

The new Cosmos
TV series airing on Fox is a worthy reboot of Carl Sagan's original.
Following in Sagan's footsteps, host Neil deGrasse Tyson takes viewers
on a voyage through the outer reaches of the solar system and beyond,
showing how our sun is just one star out of a hundred billion in the
majestic spiral of the Milky Way galaxy, and even the Milky Way itself
is a speck in the observable universe. As in the original series, he
compresses the history of the universe into a single year, showing that
on that scale, the human species emerges only in the last few seconds
before midnight on December 31.

Sagan's Cosmos was due for
an update, and not just because our computer graphics are better. Since
the original series aired, we've sent robotic rovers to Mars, sampling
its rocks and exploring its history. We've detected hundreds of alien
planets outside the solar system, finding them by the slight
gravitational wobble they cause in their home stars, or by the brief
dips in light as they pass across the star's face as seen from Earth.
We've found the Higgs boson, the elusive and long-theorized particle
that endows everything else with mass. We've discovered that the
expansion of the Universe which began with the Big Bang is accelerating,
driven by a mysterious force called dark energy. All these scientific
advances deserve to be recognized and celebrated.

The story of Cosmos
is also the story of human beings. For the vast majority of our history
as a species, we were wanderers, small hunter-gatherer bands.
Civilization is a recent innovation, arising within the last few
thousand years, and science is more recent still, appearing only in the
last few hundred. But in just those few short centuries, we've made
dramatic strides, from wooden sailing ships to space shuttles,
bloodletting to bionic limbs, quill pens to the Internet. We've drawn
back the curtain on ancient mythologies and glimpsed the true immensity
of time and space. Compared to that vastness, we're unimaginably small
and insignificant; yet we possess an intelligence and a power of
understanding that, as far as we still know, is unique among all the
countless worlds. As Carl Sagan said, "We are a way for the cosmos to
know itself."

However, not everyone accepts this as a positive
development. There have always been those who prefer a small,
comprehensible cosmos, with human beings placed firmly at the center.
The religious belief systems that posit such a universe were our first,
fumbling attempts to explain the origin of the world, and they rarely
share power gladly. Those who clash against conventional wisdom, who
dare to suggest that the cosmos holds wonders undreamed of in
conventional mythology, have always found themselves in grave peril from
the gatekeepers of dogma who presume to dictate the thoughts human
beings should be permitted to think.

America’s
extreme right has long been known for its gratuitous flag waving – but
who ever thought the flag would be Russian? As the crisis in Ukraine
unfolds, it is becoming crystal clear that leading social conservatives
and their advocacy groups are grappling with a patriot problem. While
the rest of America is actually rooting for America, these right wing
stalwarts are cheerleading for Mother Russia and are openly touting
their affinity for Vladimir Putin in the middle of an international
crisis.

In Sunday’s New York Times, reporter Ellen Barry wrote an illuminating article,
“Foes of America in Russia Crave Rupture in Ties.” Barry pointed out
that one of Russia’s most outspoken America-bashers is Vladimir I.
Yakunin, President of Russia Railways and “one of Mr. Putin’s trusted
friends.” A Russian Orthodox tycoon, he has overseen $7 billion worth of
Olympic infrastructure initiatives, but his true passion is leveraging
his fortune to turn Russia into a nationalistic, anti-Western theocracy.
According to the New York Times:

Mr.
Yakunin presented plans for a Soviet-style megaproject to develop
transportation and infrastructure in Siberia, a move toward “an
economics of a spiritual type,” he said, that would insulate Russia from
the West’s alien values.

He compared the project to
monumental endeavors from the past: the adoption of Christianity in
ancient Rus; the conquest of Siberia; electrification of the Soviet
Union; the Soviet space program; and the Olympics in Sochi.

Yakunin’s
dangerous vision is shared by the Rockford, Illinois-based World
Congress of Families (WCF), which the Southern Poverty Law Center has
designated as a hate group.
Since 2010, WCF has worked closely with Russian organizations to pass
13 new anti-gay laws, the most infamous being the one that prohibits
“propaganda of nontraditional sexual relations to minors.” This law,
which shreds free speech protections, has created “open season” on the
LGBT community, with politicians, the police, and neo-Nazi vigilante
groups carrying out violence and persecution. When Mother Jones magazine writer Hannah Levintova asked
WCF’s Managing Director, Larry Jacobs, if his organization
contributed to these draconian laws, he chuckled and replied, “Yes, I
think that is accurate.”

The online newspaper Ukrayinska Pravda (literally “Ukrainian Truth”) reported Monday
that soon, it will cost Russians up to five years in prison if they
“violate the territorial integrity” of their country — which just grew
after it annexed Crimea from Ukraine in a controversial referendum.

We checked, and sure enough, in December, the Russian parliament, the State Duma, adopted a new law that was signed by Vladimir Putin on December 28.

On
May 9, the law goes into effect, and it will become a crime in Russia
to make “public calls for action to violate the territorial integrity”
of the country.

Doing so is punishable by a fine of 300,000 rubles — about $8,400 — or imprisonment up to three years.

Doing the same thing with the use of the news media or the Internet calls for a prison term of up to five years.

Ukrayinska Pravda points out that this puts non-Russians in Crimea in a tough spot.

The Charles Koch Foundation recently released a commercial that ranked a
near-poverty-level $34,000 family among the Top 1% of poor people in
the world. Bud Konheim, CEO and co-founder of fashion company Nicole
Miller, concurred:
"The guy that's making, oh my God, he's making $35,000 a year, why
don't we try that out in India or some countries we can't even name.
China, anyplace, the guy is wealthy."

Comments like these are
condescending and self-righteous. They display an ignorance of the needs
of lower-income and middle-income families in America. The costs of
food and housing and education and health care and transportation and
child care and taxes have been well-defined by organizations such as
the Economic Policy Institute,
which calculated that a U.S. family of three would require an average
of about $48,000 a year to meet basic needs; and by the Working Poor Families Project, which estimates the income required for basic needs for a family of four at about $45,000. The median household income is $51,000.

The following discussion pertains to the half of America that is in or near poverty, the people rarely seen by Congress.

1. The Official Poverty Threshold Should Be Much Higher

According to the Congressional Research Service (CRS), "The
poverty line reflects a measure of economic need based on living
standards that prevailed in the mid-1950s...It is not adjusted to
reflect changes in needs associated with improved standards of living
that have occurred over the decades since the measure was first
developed. If the same basic methodology developed in the early 1960s
was applied today, the poverty thresholds would be over three times
higher than the current thresholds."

The original poverty
measures were (and still are) based largely on the food costs of the
1950s. But while food costs have doubled since 1978, housing has more than tripled, medical expenses are six times higher, and college tuition is eleven times higher. The Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Census Bureau have
calculated that food, housing, health care, child care, transportation,
taxes, and other household expenditures consume nearly the entiremedian household income.

CRS provides some balance, noting that the threshold should also be impacted by safety net programs: "For
purposes of officially counting the poor, noncash benefits (such as the
value of Medicare and Medicaid, public housing, or employer provided
health care) and 'near cash' benefits (e.g., food stamps..) are not
counted as income."

Last week, I wrote a post about abortion
where I explained that, personally speaking, I don’t want to have
children and, because of this, I would have an abortion if my
contraception failed and I got pregnant. By and large, the reception was
positive, because, it appears, people are sick and tired of dancing
around the topic of women’s self-determination. You shouldn’t have to
cater to a sexist society’s ideas of what women “should” be like in
order to justify using contraception and even abortion. Yes, most women
who use these services adhere more closely to traditional gender roles
than I do and want to get married and have children. Many to most
already have done these things, in fact. But the point is that women
should be free to be themselves, and compulsory child-bearing to force
women to adhere to traditional gender roles is just wrong.

But
here’s what amuses me: The official line of anti-choicers is that
they’re not interested in enforcing traditional gender roles, but that
their interest in banning abortion is about “life”. (How that explains their hostility to contraception,
however, is something they dodge and dodge and refuse to explain.) I
think that argument is in bad faith, of course. But let’s imagine, for a
moment, that the “life” argument is made in good faith. If so, then my
declaration of non-interest in having a baby should be utterly and
completely irrelevant to you. It’s already established that I’m
pro-choice and that I don’t think that an embryo is the same thing as a
conscious being like a baby. That would be, if you were just interested
in “life”, all you need to know. If you are utterly and completely
disinterested in enforcing traditional gender roles, then your reaction
to my elaboration should be, “So what? It’s not like the why of abortion
matters, and we already know she thinks that abortion is not killing a
person.”

Well, some right winger tweeted out my piece, and so I
got slammed, naturally on Twitter, even though, from the “life”
perspective, there was no new information and therefore the only reason
to get agitated is because I don’t want children. And, of course, there
was all sorts of gender policing in the tweets, from people trying to
“diagnose” me and doing the “pray for you” bit (because they believe
that it’s impossible for a normal, healthy woman to not want children)
to people trotting out tired misogynist stereotypes to people
threatening me with the usual threats—loneliness, misery—aimed at women
who reject strict gender roles. I collected them for you!

From Robert Reich:http://robertreich.org/post/80522686347Robert ReichSunday, March 23, 2014We
are witnessing a reversion to tribalism around the world, away from
nation states. The the same pattern can be seen even in America –
especially in American politics.

Before the rise of the
nation-state, between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries, the world
was mostly tribal. Tribes were united by language, religion, blood, and
belief. They feared other tribes and often warred against them. Kings
and emperors imposed temporary truces, at most.

But in the past
three hundred years the idea of nationhood took root in most of the
world. Members of tribes started to become citizens, viewing themselves
as a single people with patriotic sentiments and duties toward their
homeland. Although nationalism never fully supplanted tribalism in some
former colonial territories, the transition from tribe to nation was
mostly completed by the mid twentieth century.

Over the last
several decades, though, technology has whittled away the underpinnings
of the nation state. National economies have become so intertwined that
economic security depends less on national armies than on financial
transactions around the world. Global corporations play nations off
against each other to get the best deals on taxes and regulations.

News
and images move so easily across borders that attitudes and aspirations
are no longer especially national. Cyber-weapons, no longer the
exclusive province of national governments, can originate in a hacker’s
garage.

Nations are becoming less relevant in a world where
everyone and everything is interconnected. The connections that matter
most are again becoming more personal. Religious beliefs and
affiliations, the nuances of one’s own language and culture, the daily
realities of class, and the extensions of one’s family and its values –
all are providing people with ever greater senses of identity.

The
nation state, meanwhile, is coming apart. A single Europe – which
seemed within reach a few years ago – is now succumbing to the
centrifugal forces of its different languages and cultures. The Soviet
Union is gone, replaced by nations split along tribal lines. Vladimir
Putin can’t easily annex the whole of Ukraine, only the Russian-speaking
part. The Balkans have been Balkanized.

Religious belief systems prefer a small cosmos with humans firmly at the center.

The new Cosmos
TV series airing on Fox is a worthy reboot of Carl Sagan's original.
Following in Sagan's footsteps, host Neil deGrasse Tyson takes viewers
on a voyage through the outer reaches of the solar system and beyond,
showing how our sun is just one star out of a hundred billion in the
majestic spiral of the Milky Way galaxy, and even the Milky Way itself
is a speck in the observable universe. As in the original series, he
compresses the history of the universe into a single year, showing that
on that scale, the human species emerges only in the last few seconds
before midnight on December 31.

Sagan's Cosmos was due for
an update, and not just because our computer graphics are better. Since
the original series aired, we've sent robotic rovers to Mars, sampling
its rocks and exploring its history. We've detected hundreds of alien
planets outside the solar system, finding them by the slight
gravitational wobble they cause in their home stars, or by the brief
dips in light as they pass across the star's face as seen from Earth.
We've found the Higgs boson, the elusive and long-theorized particle
that endows everything else with mass. We've discovered that the
expansion of the Universe which began with the Big Bang is accelerating,
driven by a mysterious force called dark energy. All these scientific
advances deserve to be recognized and celebrated.

The story of Cosmos
is also the story of human beings. For the vast majority of our history
as a species, we were wanderers, small hunter-gatherer bands.
Civilization is a recent innovation, arising within the last few
thousand years, and science is more recent still, appearing only in the
last few hundred. But in just those few short centuries, we've made
dramatic strides, from wooden sailing ships to space shuttles,
bloodletting to bionic limbs, quill pens to the Internet. We've drawn
back the curtain on ancient mythologies and glimpsed the true immensity
of time and space. Compared to that vastness, we're unimaginably small
and insignificant; yet we possess an intelligence and a power of
understanding that, as far as we still know, is unique among all the
countless worlds. As Carl Sagan said, "We are a way for the cosmos to
know itself."

However, not everyone accepts this as a positive
development. There have always been those who prefer a small,
comprehensible cosmos, with human beings placed firmly at the center.
The religious belief systems that posit such a universe were our first,
fumbling attempts to explain the origin of the world, and they rarely
share power gladly. Those who clash against conventional wisdom, who
dare to suggest that the cosmos holds wonders undreamed of in
conventional mythology, have always found themselves in grave peril from
the gatekeepers of dogma who presume to dictate the thoughts human
beings should be permitted to think.

Stability in the rapidly changing Arctic
is a rarity. Yet for years researchers believed the glaciers in the
frigid northeast section of Greenland, which connect to the interior of
the country’s massive ice sheet, were resilient to the effects of
climate change that have affected so much of the Arctic.

But new data published Sunday in Nature Climate Change
reveals that over the past decade, the region has started rapidly
losing ice due to a rise in air and ocean temperatures caused in part by
climate change. The increased melt raises grave concerns that sea level rise could accelerate even faster than projected, threatening even more coastal communities worldwide.

“North Greenland is very cold and dry, and believed to be a very stable area,” said Shfaqat Khan, a senior researcher at the Technical University of Denmark who led the new study. “It is surprisingly to see ice loss in one of the coldest regions on the planet.”

The
stability of the region is particularly important because it has much
deeper ties to the interior ice sheet than other glaciers on the island.
If the entire ice sheet were to melt -- which would take thousands of
years in most climate change scenarios -- sea levels would rise up to 23
feet, catastrophically altering coastlines around the world.

Sea levels have risen 8 inches globally since the start of the 1900s, and current projections show that figure could rise another 3 feet by the end of this century.

The
leader of the Traditionalist American Knights of the Ku Klux Klan is
tired of “a few rogue Klansmen” ruining the group’s reputation, and
argues that the group is a non-violent Christian organization.

“We
don’t hate people because of their race, I mean, we’re a Christian
organization,” Frank Ancona, the group's Imperial Wizard, told
Virginia's NBC 12
on Thursday. "Because of the acts of a few rogue Klansmen, all Klansmen
are supposed to be murderers, and wanting to lynch black people, and
we're supposed to be terrorists. That's a complete falsehood.”

Ancona’s
group has come under fire from residents of Chesterfield County, Va.,
about 20 miles south of Richmond, for distributing KKK recruitment
fliers in people's yards since January.

"We picked ours up out of our driveway and threw it in the trash," Sarah Peachee told NBC 12. "We weren't interested in even reading about it."

Ancona defended the strategy, however, citing a boom in KKK membership across the country since 2008.

"In the last six years that I've been president of this organization I've seen the numbers probably triple," Ancona told NBC 12.
"The funny thing is the same neighborhoods where you're saying there
are people who don't want the flier are neighborhoods where our members
live, and neighborhoods where people are sympathetic to our cause and
are glad to hear from us.”

Although Ancona insisted that the KKK is not a hate group, he added that “We just want to keep our race the white race."

Severe lack of rain and sun-scorched earth means that when it comes to fire risks, California is now in a class of its own

California is facing wildfires "outside of any normal bounds" as a historic drought
turns drying brush and trees into a perfect tinderbox, officials have
warned. The state recorded 665 wildfires from 1 January, about three
times the average of 225 for this time of year, according to figures
compiled by Cal Fire, the state's department of forestry and fire protection.

Each
day without heavy rain deepened the risks of a catastrophic fire season
and made it hard to deal with more wildfires if and when they broke
out, officials warned. John Laird, the secretary for natural resources,
told the Guardian: "This is going to be a fire season outside any normal
bounds. Anything could happen at any time."

Although the wildfire
season does not officially start until May in the foothills of the
Sierra Nevada, locals are adjusting to life on a year-round frontline.

"This
is the first time it really hit home that we have this danger," said
Annette Lambert, who lives with her husband and two young children on
top of a thickly wooded slope with spectacular canyon views. More than
200 communities across the state, including those overlooking Auburn,
were designated fire-risk zones in the drought.

The Lambert family
knew they were entering a potentially dangerous area 10 years ago when
they built on land covered by oak, pine, and evergreen manzanita shrubs.

The
area, called Meadow Vista, meanders along the hilltops along a road too
narrow for a conventional fire engine. Most of the homes are surrounded
by trees and manzanitas; keep chicken coops or horses. Some of the
houses were situated in such a way as to channel fire to straight up to
the back door, according to fire inspectors.

"We got it from the
shape of the land that fire could course right up the hill and was going
to be an issue for us, and a risk that we would have to deal with,"
said Lambert. "But we loved the trees."They had trouble finding homeowners' insurance because the house lies more than a mile from the nearest fire hydrant.

A
century ago, the misery of New York’s urban poor was embodied by the
iconic scene of the morning shape-up at the docks, where rough-hewn
longshoremen lined up anxiously to see if the boss would pick them for
that day’s crew or turn them back empty-handed. These days, the city has
a different kind of shape-up—a less visible mill of workers staffing
its bustling boutiques and vendors. Instead of assembling at the
waterfront, they call the manager to find out how many hours they can
get on a given day—stressing about whether they’ll clock enough hours
this month to make rent, or hoping their next workday doesn’t interfere
with their school schedule or doctor’s appointment.This anxiety of living not just paycheck to paycheck but hour to hour is the focus of a new policy brief on the impact of unfair schedules on wage workers. The report, published by the progressive think tank Center for Law and Social Policy and the worker-advocacy groups Retail Action Project
(RAP) and Women Employed, reveals the flipside of the “flexibility” and
“dynamism” of twenty-first-century retail: the tyranny of the daily
schedule.

On top of the economic hardships of working a part-time
job that does not pay living wage, retail workers are often further
burdened by the stress of the on-call schedule: They have to call in
first to see if hours are available, wait for word from the boss and,
sometimes, end up with just a four-hour shift. The labor
of the whole ordeal might then be offset by the financial costs of
commuting and the disruption of their entire day. Ironically, while this
scheduling structure brings chaos to workers’ lives, it stems from a
hyper-mechanized system of computerized staffing configuration. Under
huge employers like Walmart and Jamba Juice, this Tayloristically
efficient programming often leaves workers at the mercy of variables
like the weather (a hot day demands reinforcements for a lunchtime juice
rush) or consumer whims (a slump in sales means temporarily downsizing
sales-floor staff). Even full-time workers might get saddled with
erratic shifts, or are pressured to work extra hours on short notice.

The
erratic labor structure robs workers of control over their lives. Being
constantly on call, without set hours, makes it extremely hard to
budget for basic living expenses, like housing and childcare, and
sometimes near-impossible to plan ahead for, say, saving for college.
And for the working poor,
irregular schedules could undermine access to safety-net programs and
benefits, which is, sadly, a key resource for many low-wage retail
workers who earn so little that they must rely on public welfare programs.
Working too few hours, according to the report, “may limit their
eligibility to claim firm-provided benefits like health insurance and
sick days.” And paradoxically, if they do cobble together enough hours
to pay the bills, they might then wind up earning too much to qualify for Medicaid benefits.

About Me

I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial by strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country.
Thomas Jefferson